Gosh, Don. I think this is my favorite poem of yours I've ever read. I'm honestly quite stumped as to where to begin. My immediate thoughts are when did you write it and what was it's inspiration. I might be able to pick a favorite stanza. My first thought is this one: "Detached from our hopes and sometimes forbidden desires and

acts, I saw stale time dragging its hours through the furrows

of our prior passions and rotting upon desolate altars and

neurotic shrines somewhere west of satisfaction."

It makes me want to write about time as a dog and question whether tail wags dog or the opposite. That said, there's really a lot here. A lot of love, a lot of humanity. And that single-minded drivenness which I think I've maybe only seen from someone in love. Like the noonday sun outshines the stars, it's simply bigger and brighter than everything else a billion times over. You simply can't see anything else save it's radiance and glow. This seems to depict that very well I think.

"Flying"

Thank you for your perceptive critique, Brit. I'm glad you like “Flying,” as it is one of my favorites, too! To answer your question about its background, here it is:

I wrote it in 1995, and its original title was “Through Void and Matter.” There were two influences in its construction:

1.) Deepak Chopra's conception of what he terms “the quantum mechanical human body.” Chopra (an endocrinologist from India trained in the West) bases his idea of the quantum body on subatomic/quantum mechanic physics, recent discoveries in neurobiology, and the view of the human body (and matter in general) as derived from the ancient Hindu Vedas and Upanishads. (As you know, Eliot was highly influenced by the Upanishads.)

2.) A dream I had while on vacation on North Carolina's Outer Banks. I believe the dream was prompted by Chopra's writing and probably aided in part by spending a couple of hours in the Wright Brothers' Museum at Kitty Hawk the afternoon before. In the dream, I was flying through matter. . .all sorts of strange objects! It was very surreal. (I had not been taking drugs, so wipe that smile off your face! :-)

Some years ago, I wrote my interpretation of the dream. Here it is:

“Our dreams are able to reveal the world as it could be, not as our conditioned perceptions and minds typically predetermine it to be. When dreaming, we are sometimes more awake than when lucidly fixing our attentions on the day's business. We have not the courage or vision to perceive difficult things; yet even physicists now tell us that matter is as Swiss cheese, that all voids are not even remotely empty, and that something they can't measure has always created everything from nothing. Love goes awry when we reason and act on unexamined assumptions of scarce metaphysical resources and upon unconscious expectations of becoming less than we can be. Who are we? We are made of love, by love, through love. When we genuinely love, nothing is able to obstruct our communion with those who have lived, are living, and will live. Time, space, voids, and matter dissolve into a boundless dimension of an infinite presence and the eternally present. When we awaken from our dreams to walk back into the world as it is generally experienced, we are empowered to transform all that seems to be into all that is meant to be.”

Anyway, it’s a pretty good bunch of words. Thanks for spending your time with it, Brit. I hope it benefits you as much as it has me.